 What's up, everybody? Welcome back to Recovery Monday. This is episode five. Today, we're going to talk about the idea that every human being gets anxious. It's a normal part of being alive and that your goal in recovery is not to try and vanquish anxiety from your life forever. This is important. So we're going to take 10 or 15 minutes. We're going to go over that. We're going to take some questions and answers from the community, from the audience as people arrive in the chat. So as you guys pop in here, just give me a wave. Let me know that you can see and hear me. Let me know everything's working. Let me know where you're from and all that stuff and we'll get rolling here. Just a reminder that these recovery Monday sessions are essentially lessons out of this book, The Anxious Truth. Today, we are starting chapter two, which will take us pretty much through till about Christmas. So we have quite a bit to go over. There's seven lessons in chapter two of The Anxious Truth, which you can get here. I'm getting better at pointing. If you don't already have it, if you already have it, then follow along with us, which is totally fine. But yeah, we've got about seven lessons in chapter two. So that'll take us right through to Christmas. So, hi from Long Island, says Christine Peterson. Hey, Long Island, neighbor, Long Island too, in case you don't know. So there you go. Everybody's popping in here. Good. We got a good crowd already. So we'll get rolling. Today will probably be a shorter one because it's a relatively short lesson. I just wanted to go over a few quick things with you guys. So it's really important. Yes, the pointing growth. I'm getting good at pointing. Like I figured that out where it is. So it's important to understand the difference between like regular anxiety, which is something that all human beings experience sometimes in life, and disordered anxiety, where we begin to become afraid of the anxiety itself, right? So part of being alive is that sometimes we experience anxiety for a variety of reasons. Life is stressful. Things happen, relationship problems, money problems, career problems, family problems, and those things could make us anxious. Things could happen that stress us. This is all really super normal, right? So everybody in the world has anxiety from, you know, at one time or another. And in fact, anxiety in its normal state, not disordered state actually serves a purpose. Sometimes it keeps us alert for actual things that we really have to pay attention to. Just our issue is that we are dealing with a situation where the anxiety itself has become almost a false alarm threat. And so in recovery, we are not trying to guarantee that you will never be anxious ever again. That would be really frustrating. And you would wind up being very disappointed. Because even a fully recovered person, and I don't know anybody more recovered than me can experience anxiety from time to time, I can get anxious over things here and there. Like I'm alive, I have a life, my life can be stressful. And sometimes I will feel some anxiety. We just care about what happens when we become afraid of feeling anxiety, then we get into these rituals where we try to stop the anxiety from happening, try and stop our symptoms, we try to escape from them, we try to escape from our anxious thoughts. That is what we're after here. So we are never trying to completely eliminate anxiety from any human life, we're trying to eliminate the anxiety disorder. So that's that's really important. I want to give you like a little bit of an analogy that may and may not apply. But I mean, it's a little bit oversimplified. But I think you'll get the idea. Imagine that you are trying to learn to ride a bicycle. And when you practice riding your bicycle, you fall and you skin your knee and it hurts and it's no fun. And so you become afraid of the next time you have to ride that bicycle. But you keep at it and you keep practicing and you keep practicing and you get your bumps and bruises and then suddenly over time you begin to learn that to ride that bicycle. Well, once you know how to ride the bicycle, and you are no longer afraid of riding the bicycle. Would you ever ask the question, will I have to ride a bike again? You won't care if the answer is yes or no. So when the question comes up, you know, people ask me all the time, like, Drew, do you still get anxious? The answer would be, well, sometimes I can experience anxiety. Sometimes I can even experience panic. It just doesn't matter anymore. So once you learn to ride the bike, while you're in the process of learning, and you're afraid of the bike, because you don't want to get bumps and bruises, you don't want to fall off, you would be afraid of the next time that you have to ride. But once you're past that, and you know how to ride, and you're not afraid of it anymore, you will no longer fear the next time you have to get on your bike, you might have to ride your bike today, you might not who knows, but either way, you'd be okay. So that's a little bit oversimplified, but it does kind of apply to what we're after here. So I know it's hard for you to believe or maybe even understand. But in the end, you want to get to the point where whether or not you feel anxious is irrelevant. So if I have a an anxious day, a regularly anxious day, because maybe I'm stressed out over something, I know like, okay, what's bothering me and I can actually work on that issue. So normal anxiety is generally externally focused. I don't turn inward and start to wonder why do I feel this way? Is this dangerous? Oh my God, I'm gonna have a heart attack. I'm gonna lose it. I'm gonna go insane. I'm gonna lose control. Can I not handle this? I don't do that anymore. So I understand that that anxiety is probably the result of something external from me, some event or thing that's going on in my life possibly. And I can kind of work through that, right? Because I'm capable of doing that as are you capable of working through your stuff. So that is why we say that humans, the title of this talk today is humans get anxious. It actually serves a purpose for us. It's there for a reason it can be a good thing. And sometimes we hear about people that talk about like the wisdom of anxiety or the blessing of anxiety. And that's sometimes a little misguided type stuff in this community when you're dealing with people who are in the thick of the recovery struggle. But there is some truth in that like anxiety does play an actual productive role in a human life, fear and anxiety play a productive role when they go back into their normal place in our lives. So it's important to understand that a couple of things that I want to cover and then we will we'll start to get into comments. Like I said, this will be a probably a short one today. So a couple of things that people often wonder is well, does this mean that I have to endure high anxiety, like, you know, really being like buried under your intrusive thoughts or your symptoms? Do I am I going to panic every day for the rest of my life? No, that's not what I'm saying. Again, when you stop being afraid of riding your bike, then you no longer like react so strongly to the idea that you have to ride your bike and then it just becomes a normal part of your life. So no, I'm not saying that you have to endure these high levels of panic and anxiety and distress for the rest of your life at all. Like not at all. The fact that you are afraid of the anxiety is what is keeping it up here right now. And when that fear goes away, when you do the recovery work, then that comes down, right? So you know, you do not have to endure anxiety at this level for the rest of your life. That's not at all what I'm saying. People also wonder, well, do I just have to be like super courageous and superhero brave every day for the rest of my life? And the answer to that is no, you do not. You have to kind of be superhero brave to get the ball rolling in recovery. And while you're doing the work, that's true. I'm not gonna deny that like there's courage and bravery involved in doing this stuff. But in the end, this is not the way you have to live your life. You don't have to be like a superhero courageous, crazy brave person for the rest of your life every day you that's not how that works. So again, once you lose the fear, anxiety goes back down to a normal place in your life. It doesn't dominate, you're not afraid of it, you don't spend all day long wondering how you feel, you're not worried about it. And no, you don't have to be brave at this level every day for the rest of your life. So people often worry about that. They asked that question too. So I wanted to definitely address that I wrote that in the chapter in the book and I wanted to bring it up here too. So one more thing that I want to address and I'll start scrolling through comments, right? One of the things that I pointed out in this lesson in the anxious truth in the book is, I did give a nod to the Gad people to generalize the anxiety disorder people, right? So people who do not have Gad for instance, especially as he part this year and he's talking about it's being really difficult times right now and it is for the last two years and even more politically and you know, the pandemic and economically and there's just a lot going on in the world, right? So during tough times, there are a lot of people who walk around just kind of upset and agitated and anxious all the time too. They just don't have Gad, they would not have a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. And they are not consumed with the fact that they are anxious. So during times of high stress, regular human beings can walk around all day long also anxious. They just don't make it the most important thing, right? They don't make it the most important thing in their lives. I'm not saying that you can just decide to not care about your anxiety. But just consider the difference if you're a Gad person, and you're just going to say, Well, I just I'm anxious all day long, and I don't understand this and I can't make it go away. Consider that there are other people walking around right now, you might know some of them personally, who are somewhat anxious all day long too. They just don't assign it the same importance that you do. So that is a part of the Gad complex, turning it into the most important thing in the room all the time matters. So again, we're not trying to eliminate anxiety altogether. But if you immediately sound the alarm button and think that you must take some sort of evasive action when you feel anxiety, then you're kind of missing the point of putting it back into the normal place in life, right? So I just wanted to nod to my my Gad folks, I know you're out there. I know you're always looking for more info on that. But consider that your neighbor right now might be feeling anxious all day long, almost every day at some level. And they just they would not describe it the same way that you do. That's not a fix for you. But it is something to at least consider, because it puts things into perspective to a certain way, right? So like I said, it's a pretty short lesson in the book. So let's go through some comments and see what we got. I see a bunch of people New Hampshire is here, I get a neighbor from Long Island, Texas. Love it. Alaska is here. Love it. Toronto to big fan of Toronto. You spent a lot of time there when I was in college. Didn't leave best Halloween ever. Let's put up some comments on the screen here so we could like cheer for people. Great job, Helen. Best Halloween ever. Love it might not have been like the greatest day for you, but you did it. And now you're feeling good. So congratulations. That's really great. Let's see. Okay, so Joanne, let's put this up. This is super common, right? Joanne says struggling. She struggles immediately with feeling anxious or panicky over what would just be normal anxiety for humans? Yes, exactly. So right now, there's probably people close to in your life that are dealing with some very anxious situations or they're afraid of things. They're just not declaring it a giant disaster like we do. So that's the difference over time. We can put that anxious situation back into its normal place and not hit boom, you know, not hit the eject button on that. So let's see here. Let's scroll down here. Don has always got a good comment. And another plus we become expert at riding bikes. But and that's true. So let's follow that. Don is making a joke. But I made the bicycle analogy in the beginning of the video. And by the way, just a quick 30 second note, these videos stay in the Facebook group. So if you're in the Facebook group, they stay there. They stay on my main Facebook page. They stay on my YouTube channel and I even post them to Instagram after. So if you ever want to go back and rewatch these, they're in all the places. But let's get back to Donna's thing. My bicycle analogy, once you learn to ride a bike, you're not really afraid of it anymore. And yes, bonus, now you can maybe like do mountain biking and trail biking, or you could take your bike grocery shopping instead of paying for gas. So there are benefits to learning to ride the bike, just like there are benefits to learning the skills of recovery and practicing them to get there. So the bike, that's actually really it was a joke, but it's actually there's validity in that there's a bonus at the end when you learn to ride the bike, you're now a bike expert and you can use that. So when you go through the recovery process, you learn skills also and they bleed over after recovery. And it become useful in the rest of your life. So Donna, that was actually a very insightful comment, even though you may have been making just a joke. Let's see what Bethany has to say. Many people have felt normal anxiety in the past. Yes, there you go. This is also another good one. Like there is a really good chance that you might be maybe distorting your past a little bit right now and saying, I just want the old me back. I was never anxious. I know I would tell you that for the first 19 years of my life, I never ever ever got anxious. But in retrospect, I look back now and I know like, Oh, wait a minute. Yes, I did. I just didn't recognize what it was. I didn't know that I was feeling anxious. I wasn't an anxious person and get anxious a lot. But you know, if you read like my first book An Anxiety Story, I will tell you the story of how I was bullet proof titanium coated armor plated never got anxious. But really, over the years, and especially in the last two years or so, in retrospect, I could say, Well, I did have some anxious times. I just didn't understand what that was. And I didn't hit the panic button because of how I was feeling. All right. Let's see what else we got. We seem to forget. Yes, we do. Joanne says another comment. We seem to forget what it's like to just have regular anxiety. And this is true. So like, when you're in the thick of the disorder of anxiety, often we can get trapped into that distortion that says all or none. I either have I'm either going to be perfectly common and like happy again and joyful, or I'm disastrous in the pits of anxiety and fear and despair. And I can't. That's not true. There's a giant middle ground that human beings kind of inhabit. In fact, I would say that probably our default state is neutral. That's not either afraid, anxious or happy, joyful. It's pretty much neutral. So there's a very wide range of states that human beings could be in. But right now you may be thinking, Nope, I'm either going to be anxiety free. And the old me was like happy, go lucky and just joyful all the time never anxious. Or I'm stuck in this. I can't do it. I'm trapped. I'm pinned down by anxiety. That's not true. There's a very wide range you can exist in. And guess what? We are able to exist in all of those ranges. We're good. We can handle all of them. We're built for it. We really are. Let's see. Okay, so this is a good comment too. By the way, I don't think you guys can see it. The camera's up too high. But Katarina is an artist and behind me is one of her original paintings that I really like. So I have it up on the wall in my office. And she says anxiety equals discomfort. And I always did my best to avoid discomfort. That is a big deal. Like that is a big insight because we can look at those at this in the recovery process and say, Oh, I've always been one that kind of runs from a challenge or runs from discomfort. And sometimes not that recovery is designed to make you a brand new like different person. But oftentimes the lessons that you learn in the recovery process can help you improve that situation to a certain extent. If you think it needs to be improved, if you don't think it needs to be improved, that's okay too. Right. That's okay. There are no basic rules here like everything is okay. Let's see here. Okay. Oh, fear does not. I think you yep. Sorry. So I'm like, wait a minute, we got to talk about this. But I don't think that you meant it. You meant it doesn't equal danger. I'm assuming right. Fear does not equal danger. Faith. Helen, I want to put that up on the screen again. I don't know if that was a mistake. Fear sometimes indicates that there is danger. And that's why fear is useful for us. But in the state of disordered anxiety, where you are afraid of being anxious, you're afraid of the anxiety itself, the key, the linchpin of recovery is that that fear does not equal danger. Right. So I think that's what you were saying, but I just want to put it up there just to be safe. Let's see. What is Patricia said, dealt with anxiety for 10 years, really great times. Okay. Well, this is pretty common too. Let's put it up here. Okay, Helen, thank you for clarifying that. I thought so. But it was worth it was worth clarifying for somebody who's watching the replay. I've dealt with anxiety for 10 years. And I find that I have some really great times it will go for months and then there will be months that I feel amazing. Okay. So this is a good point to and like I said, a few minutes ago, is a very wide range of states that human beings exist in and all of them are allowed and all of them are navigable, right? So one of the more common things that speaks to today's lesson that humans get anxious, it's normal, is that people will go down the recovery road and they'll start to feel better. And maybe they won't experience particular symptoms will start to fade away or panic attacks will become a little bit less or the intrusive thoughts will get a little softer. And then one morning they wake up and there's a new symptom or a new thought, or they're feeling more anxious than they have in two months. And oftentimes one of the mistakes is to just forget the principles of recovery and say, oh, that's it. Everything has been washed away. I've got zero progress. I'm back to square one. This is unacceptable. And that is a misinterpretation of the role of anxiety in your life, right? So it could be that a real life thing is triggering some feelings of stress and anxiety, and then you're interpreting it in the old ways. So we have to get to that point where we stop saying like, oh, this is not okay. If I cannot allow myself to ever feel anxious, or I'm going to declare that it's a failure. That's, that's not fair to yourself. It's going to put you in a really bad spot, right? So it's important. So let's see here. No, no, no, I didn't want to get rid of it. Very good. Very good. I'm going to keep scrolling, keep scrolling, trying to get to the bottom here. Okay, what do we have here? I'm sorry, if you're in the Facebook group, I can't see who you are. All I see on restream is Facebook user, but that's okay. Everything you say is correct and works wonders. Well, I'm glad that you're finding it useful. So let's see here. This is a driving question I see, like you find it hard to operate a motor vehicle while experiencing the symptoms. I can tell you that that was my number one problem was driving. And I just drove while I was in a panic. And in the end, even though I would have at one time swore that that was impossible to do, turns out I was wrong. So I'll just share that with you. Let's see here. No, no, no, no. Okay, I know, I know this. I'm just going to scroll down here. Hey, Marcy, it's been a long time. I haven't seen you around. Good to see you. Starting your seventh week back in school. Well, good luck to you. Are you a teacher? That's my hat is off to you if you are. Okay, so let's see what is what we got going on here. Tony says since finishing the anxious truth, I haven't had a full blown panic attack in almost three weeks. They try to come but my recovery has made it much easier to deal with. Thank you for the very kind words. I would like to think that the book is gold. Maybe it is maybe it isn't. But yeah, it's part of what we're learning on the recovery journey is a new relationship to those things. Right. So that happens. Layla is here. Layla it is so good to see you, my friend. Thank you for popping in. I appreciate you. You help a lot of people. Thanks. You're welcome. You're very welcome. Let's see. I'm trying to get to the bottom here. Okay, hang on here. Let's put Layla up on the screen again. You know one of my favorite things is when you guys cheer for each other. Now I'm not like telling you to cheer for Layla would like it if you did. I love it when you cheer for each other. But yes, that's a big deal. Great job Layla. I love it. Unfortunately, Layla Instagram doesn't show me your stuff by default anymore. So I have to dig to find you. So I missed it. But great job. No, no, no, no, no. Let's see here. I am considering camping at this. Okay, let's see here. I don't know if I should put these up on the screen. This is funny. I'm considering camping out by my mailbox. Don't do that. Just stay inside. It's really okay. I don't know where you live, but it's getting cold out here in New York. So don't don't camp out. Let's see here. Yes, Amanda, the book is literally called I don't want to get into book selling here, but the book is called the anxious truth. So if you search for it on Amazon, or if you go to I'll put a link up on the screen on my website. All the links are to get it are there. Let me kill this comment real quick. Let's see. I'm almost at the end here almost at the end. Oh, this is good. Kevin. So Layla's husband is a musician. And that's so funny. The first album was the lonely position of neutral. I call back to when I said like our default state is probably neutral. And I believe that to be true. Most of the time, and after you have reached that famous recovery finish line, you just don't think about how you feel until you have to. So, you know, that's one of those things like you just stop thinking about how you feel all the time because it's no longer important because you're not afraid of it. Um, let's see here. Anna is asking about tinnitus tinnitus. However way you say it, I have a little bit of it in my left ear. And that is from literally from listening to loud music for too long. I damaged my own left ear. If you have a symptom that does scare you doing the work around acceptance, you lose the fear of that particular symptom. It will remain uncomfortable. We drop the fear. Yes, that is pretty much how that works. So I can't make I can't make it go away. Now, some people will say that that tinnitus or tinnitus is an anxiety symptom. I do know people that have developed that as a symptom that whistling that sound in the ear. But it's such a strange like a subjective thing to it's hard to describe to somebody because they can't hear what you hear in your head. So I do know people that will say that they have tinnitus or tinnitus as an anxiety symptom and then when they got better, it went away. So I have heard those stories, but I think most audiologists and neurologists would tell you that no, no, if you have tinnitus, then that's not an anxiety symptom and it could stay. So I've heard it described both ways, but I've also heard people like claim that all if you you know, if you use my anxiety program, I'll cure your tinnitus. Be careful about that because maybe not if that's if it's just an auditory, a neurological problem in your ear, then recovery it won't cure it. But you don't have to fear it. You can hate it. You can totally hate it. But I sometimes it's really annoying for me. I'm just not afraid of it. I get I don't like it sometimes but that's what it is. Okay, so let's scroll down to the bottom here and then I have a hard time pulling over. Okay, so let's throw this up here really quickly with the driving thing because I see that Amanda right underneath I have a hard time pulling over. Then Amanda asks what did I do specifically to manage my anxiety while driving? The most important thing that I did Amanda is that I stopped trying to manage it. It does not need to be managed. It doesn't need to be stopped. It doesn't need to be prevented. It doesn't need to be lessened. It doesn't need to be coped with. In fact, I think in two weeks not this coming Monday and not this Wednesday but next Wednesday I have a podcast episode out called coping skills. What are coping skills and do we really need them? Like I just needed to just let it happen while I was driving. And when I did that and practiced it over and over and over it was hard and it was scary especially in the beginning. But then I didn't have to have any special rituals that enabled me to drive because the anxiety would would rise it would hit its peak and then we come back down naturally because that's what our bodies do that I would return back to you know kind of a calmer state not perfectly calm but not panic. And it was way easier to drive when I would just let it wash over me go through me and be over with way easier. So I stopped trying to manage my anxiety not just in driving but all all in every context that trying to manage it is is a dead end. It's really it's a problem. Let's see here. Oh no no no no no I'm going to keep scrolling almost to the bottom here. Oh your back is a student. Oh well congratulations. Marcy that's cool. That's super cool. So congratulations for being back in school. I didn't know if you were a teacher or a student. So there you go. Let's scroll down here. Did someone say party at Joanne's fabrics lately. Clearly you've got a party going on there. I'm going to scroll to the bottom here. Well this is probably a good point. I mean I don't want to go too far into like speculating about audiological problems. But it's possible. It's certainly possible that clenching your jaw could could have to do with maybe a little bit of ringing in your ear. It could be. But again I don't I don't know enough about it. Let's see here. Where what is Laila saying here. Where are you live if not here on Facebook group. I tried YouTube and Instagram but I didn't see you there. If you go to the anxioustruth.com slash links you'll get to my link tree and you'll see my YouTube channel there. So all of these you can subscribe to the channel there and I'm live on YouTube and on Facebook and then I post afterwards to Instagram. So I've rarely done Instagram live these days just because this works so much better. So much better. So this is way better. All right. Very good. All right. All right peeps. 25 minutes. It was good. We got to do a lot of. OK. I'll throw this one up here because I just missed this. That's not a. So here this is the one that I know people think is very special all the time that like oh how do you deal with that. You know it's special. It's kind of not. So somebody in the Facebook group the other day I think said that there's you know they were talking to a therapist about this and essentially said well you know I can't because then I'm afraid that I might I might wet myself. I might pee myself and the therapist said well then you'll have to do that. And that's true. So you know the fear that you might have to do that is not the same of having to do that. So that's the best advice I have for you is you're trying to avoid an outcome that you think is absolutely terrible and even in the worst case it's not the end of the world. So really that's just about the idea of you know understanding that no matter what happens you can handle it and tolerate it. But right now your fear that you are going to have an accident somehow if you go out is is driving you to the edge of that distorted thinking that saying well if I fear it's going to happen then it's probably going to happen and I can't let that happen. So that's not really true. That's not really true. Like and then there's there are all the rituals that you develop around that that you think is saving you from it but it never really has. So yes human beings have to go to the bathroom sometimes that's OK. There are bathrooms in the world we can use them. It's it's a matter of understanding that you can tolerate all of the uncertainty around your bathroom habits. You can you can handle it you can go do what you need to do when you have to do it. And there is no worst case scenario like everybody has had embarrassing moments in their lives everybody. So that's my best advice on that. OK, let's see. I don't want to hey Lorraine welcome. I'm kind of kind of out of time. So I don't think I could take this question but I will tell you that I go dizzy and hot. You're asking me about symptoms. We almost never talk about symptoms. You get your body responds to being afraid. That's OK. You don't have to be afraid of what your body does when it is afraid. That's that's the answer to that. OK. So there you go. All right peeps. So thanks for coming by today. Good questions. Good comments. I appreciate you all like encouraging yourself each other and helping each other out. Encourage I appreciate that very much as a matter of fact. And again this all of these will stay up in my Facebook the Facebook group my YouTube and I will post to Instagram. All of these recovery Mondays are lessons out of this book by it or don't but it's a damn good book. So you can get it at the link there. Oh I ruined my pointing streak. I did it. I did the wrong thing. And yeah I'll see you guys next week. Same time same channel and I forget we're talking about next week but it's going to be good when I'm sure and yeah we'll keep these going. So thanks for coming by. Have a good one.